Six Pack Shortcuts Uses Promoted Videos To Get Ripped

Some members of the YouTube community are searching for workout videos, fitness tips, and the best advice on how to get a ripped body and six pack abs. No, ma’am, I’m not one of them. To paraphrase Agent K in Men in Black (1997), “We at SEO-PR do not have a ripped body we’re aware of.”

I’m just saying that some other members of the YouTube community are trying to lose weight or improve their health. And many are regularly watching how-to videos from the privacy and comfort of their own homes on the Six Pack Shortcuts channel, which features Mike Chang showing viewers the fastest way to get six pack abs.

Now, it’s hard to believe that Chang was once out of shape, but he has since become an online fitness guru and personality. Through trial and error, he learned the best ways to give his body a workout. Years later, he decided to become an ISSA certified fitness trainer and developed a popular workout system that received acclaim from many who had previously failed at achieving chiseled physiques.

Soon, many of Chang’s clients and colleagues began calling him the “Six Pack Abs” coach. With encouragement from his client Daniel Rose, Chang began filming his workout routines and sharing them on a YouTube brand channel in October 2010. Eventually, there was a demand for more videos, and with help from Rose, who became his new marketing manager, Chang began promoting his YouTube videos through Promoted Videos.

Rose says, “Our first month advertising with Promoted Videos, we spent $220. We started very small, and were able to rapidly scale our campaign up.”

Five months later, the duo uploaded one of their most popular videos to date, a 3.5-minute workout, the “Home Chest & Back Workout.” The team scaled up their ad campaign, and the video currently has close to 5 million views.

Rose says, “About 4 million of these views came from advertising, the rest were from organic searches.” He adds, “We love Promoted Videos because it introduces people to our channel and allows them to sample our content and build a relationship over time. Once they do the workouts and get results, and once they’ve built a relationship with Mike, it’s far easier to sell them on the full course. In the fitness business, winning your customers’ trust is key – and YouTube is a great way to build that trust.”

Customers can access Chang’s online fitness empire at sixpackshortcuts.com, which offers DVDs for sale, digital fitness courses, and access to his community of trainers as well as his blog. Most sales leads come through social media and YouTube, where potential customers can watch and try Chang’s workout system.

Rose says, “Our most successful video in terms of community engagement and branding has been our M-100s video.” He adds, “It is our most ‘favorited’ video out of those that have gotten more than 1 million views.”

Rose says, “The video has inspired dozens of video responses from people doing the workout themselves, and the best part for me, personally, is that I have run into guys in gyms doing the workouts multiple times. I’ve also had people recognize me and tell me they lost a lot of fat and got in shape by doing M-100s alone. So that has been amazing.”

Rose and Chang recently announced an M-100s contest — asking their online community to upload videos of themselves doing the M-100s workout — through YouTube and Facebook. The response was remarkable, and the team recently uploaded “Insane Home Cardio Workout (M-100s montage).” During the video’s first weekend YouTube, the M-100s montage video received over 29,000 video views.

Rose says, “On a direct response basis, Promoted Videos produces the best ROI of any traffic source.” He adds, “Because of the scale of YouTube and Google, we were also able to scale our campaigns up very quickly when we began making a profit.”

Building an online community of subscribers to their YouTube channel also helps.

Rose says, “We currently regard our channel and subscriber base as one of our biggest assets, and our main goal is to build this as large as possible.” He adds, “Not only do subscribers purchase directly, but they also influence how many more people to discover your video organically.”

Chang says the essence of their online strategy relies on, “putting out good stuff that people react to. People don’t care how professional your video is. They prefer something that is genuine and real.”

A year ago, Chang and Rose financed their business by emptying out their savings and maxing out their credit cards. For the first few months, Chang was sleeping on an air mattress in Rose’s apartment.

Today, Six Pack Shortcuts has more than 47.7 million total upload views and over 270,000 subscribers, making it the #44 Most Subscribed (All Time) channel by Gurus.

Maintaining their strong small business work ethic, Chang and Rose still managed to upload “Insane M-100s Workout in Hawaii!” during a recent vacation in Kailua Bay – a long, long way from any air mattresses.

It’s good to discover the real truth about Six Pack Shortcuts using Promoted Videos to get all those views and subscribers in less than a year. We at SEO-PR can use Promoted Videos, too, even if we are more likely to get a six pack than abs.

Have Something to Say? We're listening!

Want to chime in on this article? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook or Twitter.

Greg Jarboe is President and Co-Founder of SEO-PR, an award-winning content marketing agency. He is also the author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day" as well as a contributor to four other books. He is an instructor in the Rutgers Business School Executive Education Mini-MBA program as well as Coursera. In addition to Tubular Insights (fka ReelSEO), he also writes for The SEM Post.